The current practice to mitigate lost link or communications with ground control stations is to manually generate contingency plans. This process is tedious, error prone, time consuming, and not suitable for long duration flights with hundreds of waypoints. During lost link or communications with ground control stations, a contingency flight plan is critical for normal landing and flight termination (crash) of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a Drone. The present invention includes methods and systems that can generate contingency plans for lost links in a fast, automatic, comprehensive, and systematic manner.
Most past studies focused on the impact of lost links mainly from the air traffic controller's view point, but missed many areas in the roles of pilots and mishap UAVs. These areas include: mitigation, prevention and rescue/recovery strategies and plans from maintenance engineers, mission planners, and pilots.